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[ by Charles Cameron — considering a rare attribute in two religious leaders ]
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Christopher Anzalone tells a story about the Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr (above, left), Moqtada‘s father, in his highly recommended podcast on Jihad & Martyrdom in Contemporary Muslim Militants with Karl Morand.

I’m very slow at transcription, but this story hit me with its insight into an aspect of religion that — as the story itself illustrates — is not always recognized, and i was able to find the same story told elsewhere, though not with the flair Chris brings to the telling. Here it is, as recounted by Patrick Cockburn in his book, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq:

One former disciple of Mohammed Sadiq tells an anecdote illustrating his master’s pragmatism. “One day, I was sitting with Mohammed Sadiq in his office, when a man came in to ask the price of tomatoes,” he says. “The question infuriated me: I thought he had come to mock us. But al-Sadr, wiser and smarter than I am, gave him a detailed answer, giving him the price of different kinds of tomatoes. He had understood what the question was about. I caught up with the man as he left the office and asked him why he had asked the question. He replied: ‘In selecting a marji’ [a religious figure to emulate and whose rulings he would accept], I choose the one who knows my suffering, who is close to the poor and the disinherited.'”

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Pope Francis has a similar direct and simple approach, and from the very start of his pontificate it has been winning him admirers, both religious and secular. He refuses the limo, preferring to take the bus. He pays his own bill as he checks out at the hotel front desk (above, right). He telephones the guy in Buenos Aires whose newsstand supplied his daily newspaper, to thank him and cancel his subscription…

Person to person.

[ by Charles Cameron — an Ayatollah’s video take-down of the Grand Mufti ]
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Today’s latest news from the Long War Journal is titled Egyptian jihadists call for attacks in Shiite countries and opens with the paragraph:

Twenty Egyptian jihadists have issued a statement calling upon Sunnis to launch attacks in Shiite-led countries in response to the Assad regime’s offensive in Qusayr, a city in western Syria near Homs. The chief signatory on the statement is Mohammed al Zawahiri, the younger brother of al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri.

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I’ve been having some conversations on Twitter recently in which I’d been verifying my own sense that Hezbollah‘s ethos and imagery of martyrdom would presumably extend beyond the poppies and doves depicted here to include also the martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbala, and I’m grateful to Phillip Smyth for his confirmation and elaboration on that theme.

Somehow in my wanderings, I came across this video, in which Ayatollah Sayed Hadi al Modarresi, a senior Shia cleric, bookends his even more senior Sunni counterpart the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, with his own commentary, speaking from the very heart of Shia passion — the shrine of Imam Husayn in Kerbala.

The Ayatollah challenges the Grand Mufti’s assertion that Husayn erred in refusing his oath of obedience to Yazid, thus bringing his own death upon himself at the ensuing battle of Kerbala:

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Things that impressed me:

The simple but rhetorically effective use of one video quoted within another.

The incredible passion of the crowd in Kerbala, which the poster called to our attention with a note saying:

Keep watching to see the fury of the audience..

The half-accusatory, half-conciliatory way in which the Grand Mufti expressed himself, with phrases that suggested Husayn — may God be pleased with him — was in error, while asking God to forgive him…

and:

and in response, the Ayatollah’s use of the imagery of the “red line”:

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If the Long War Journal piece shows us an aspect of the current situation, this stunning video offers us a window into the passions such events are poised to arouse.

[ by Charles Cameron — with Wagner and Abu Dujana as examples, the cognitive sting here is in the tail — the power of a double image to engage both emotion and insight ]
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Love and death.

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The human mind thinks in parallelisms and oppositions.

My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult; how to their full joy, but to their sorrow also, they loved each other, and how at last they died of that love together upon one day; she by him and he by her.

Thus begins Bédier‘s version of The Romance of Tristan & Iseult as Hilaire Belloc presents it in its classic English form. The parallel there, between love and death, is found also in Freud’s binary opposition of Eros and Thanatos, which he suggests in Civilization and Its Discontents:

The name libido can again be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros in contradistinction to the energy of the death instinct.

and in Wagner’s Liebestod — by way of returning to Tristan and Iseult:

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Likewise, there’s a parallelism between jihad by pen (jihad bil qalam) and by sword (jihad bil saif) — shown in Abu Dujana al-Khurasani‘s move from writing on the forums to martyrdom in Khost — which al-Awlaki phrases in terms of ink and blood in eulogizing Sayyid Qutb in Constants on the Path of Jihad: